These excerpts are from Dr. Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor , written in 2004. I am putting up a series of posts from this book, because Dr. Paul Farmer is well respected in the mainstream as well as in the Christian community. He has worked in rural Haiti for more than 20 years. This post shares Yolande’s story, she fled Haiti after being beaten for promoting adult literacy and ended up in Guantanamo where she was treated even worse.

Currently Guantanamo is prepared to receive thousands of Haitian refugees, let’s do everything we can to make sure they will not be treated the same way they were the last time they visited this US base.

Yolande’s Story:

A few hundred HIV-positive Haitian refugees were detained for as long as two years on the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “US Base is an Oasis to Haitians” read the headline of an article published on November 28, 1991, in the New York Times, often termed our national paper of record. The perspective of Yolande Jean, interned on the base for eleven months, is somewhat different from that of the Times:

We were in a space cordoned off with barbed wire. Wherever they put you, you were meant to stay right there; there was no place to move. The latrines were brimming over. There was never any cool water to drink, to wet our lips. There was only water in a cistern, boiling in the hot sun. When you drank it, it gave you diarrhea….Rats crawled over us at night….When we saw all these things, we thought, it’s not possible, it can’t go on like this. We’re humans, just like everyone else.

Both Yolande and her husband Athenor, were members of Komite Inite Demokratik, a democratic organization founded shortly after Duvalier’s departure; Yolande was heavily involved with adult literacy projects. After the coup, on April 27, 1992, Yolande was arrested and during the course of her torture, Yolande, visibly pregnant with her third child, began to bleed. On her second day in prison she miscarried. She did not receive medical attention. She decided to leave Haiti if she survived.

When she was released she:

I took the boat on May twelfth, and on the fourteenth they came to get us. They did not say where they were taking us. We were still in Haitian waters at the time….when the American soldiers came for us. But we thought they might be coming to help us…there were sick children on board….They burned all of our clothes, everything we had, the boat, our luggage, all the documents we were carrying….They just started towing our belongings, and the next thing we know, the boat was in flames. Photos, documents. If you didn’t have pockets in which to put things, you lost them. The reason that I came through with some of my documents is because I had a backpack and was wearing pants with pockets. They went through my bag and took some of my documents. Even my important papers they took. American soldiers did this. Fortunately, I had hidden some papers in my pockets.

In spite of the odds against all Haitians seeking asylum, Yolande Jean’s case for refugee status should have been airtight. She was a longstanding member of an organization targeted for political repression; she and her husband had been arrested and tortured; and she had managed to preserve key documents proving this. In fact, Yolande Jean was indeed one of those few refugees who passed scrutiny; US law provided her safe haven as a bona fide political refugee. One problem remained, however: Yolande, like all the refugees, had been tested for HIV. Unlike most, her test was positive.

By the time mass screening of all refugees was completed, the US government had identified 268 HIV-positive refugees. Although Yolande and many others had already passed the stringent requirements for refugee status and were thus guaranteed asylum, authorities invoked US immigration law to keep these Haitians out. In contrast, Cubans who hijacked planes to Miami or who arrived on US soil by other means were not even tested for HIV, as Haitians were quick to point out. -p59

They sent me to Camp Number 3, to have a blood test. They didn’t specify what test they were doing, but everyone had one. The others [who had been classed as bona fide political refugees] were authorized to leave for the US. There I was, and they didn’t call me…I was the last person left in the camp.

After three days of waiting, they called me. They told me, “You have a little problem.” They asked my age, they asked for photo ID. They told me I had a little problem, but they’d send me to see a doctor…and he’d resolve everything for me. They said, after twenty-two days you’ll be fine, you’ll go to the US. I asked what sort of problem they were referring to. They said, “It’s a little virus you have.” I replied, “There’s no such thing as a ‘little virus’; speak clearly so that I can understand.”

They put me in a small room, and eight soldiers surrounded me….I told them not to touch me. Don’t worry, they said, you’ll be cured. I told them to speak clearly so that I could understand. Even the interpreter couldn’t explain. Tell me! I see what you are saying–that I have AIDS. Fine, I have AIDS. Don’t tell me, then, that you’ll cure me. That in twenty-two days I’ll be fine!

At that point, two military police turned me around, grabbed me by both arms in order to put me on the bus for [camp] Bulkeley. -p60

Out of encounters such as this was born the “HIV detention camp” on Guantanamo, known as Camp Bulkeley. Inmates received new bracelets identifying them as HIV-positive.

While the US press wrote of the detainees as unfortunates caught in a beurocratic limbo, the Haitians spoke of far more malicious mistreatment.

They gave me two pills and an injection. I asked them, why the injection? Because you have a little cold, they replied. But it wasn’t a vaccine, it was an injection in the buttocks. And if you didn’t want it, you had no choice: they simply said, it’s for your own good. You have to accept it, or they call soldiers to come and hold you, force you to take it, or they put you in the brig and bring your pills to you there. There were people who refused to have their blood drawn; soldiers came to handcuff them, tie them up in order to draw their blood.

I learned that the injection the doctor had given me was Depo-Provera. I began having heavy bleeding. I bled for three months, lost weight. There were other women who’d had the injection before me, but I didn’t know that. If I’d learned of this ahead of time, I would have tried to warn the others and prevent their receiving it….When I learned this, I tried to stop them. No, I said, you will not commit this crime.

Depo-Provera, an analog of the hormone progesterone, is prescribed as a long-acting contraceptive. In legal terms, the forced injection of any substance represents the felony crime of assault. -p63

In the meantime…back in the US…

As the presidential campaign heated up, it became clear that Clinton’s proposed policy (considering Haitians for political asylum) toward Haitian refugees would not be popular. The cover of the September 1992 edition of USA Today carried a photograph of a huddled mass of Haitian refugees, some of them children, on the decks of a Coast Guard cutter. ” As compassionate as Americans try to be,” asked the caption, “can we realistically afford an open border policy?” One read, in some newspapers, of “the outrage over treatment of Haitian refugees,” but this outrage was strangely absent from most expressions of public opinion, which was perhaps more accurately reflected in the comments of immigration officials. One Associated Press reporter interviewed Duke Austin, special assistant to the director of congressional and public affairs ant the INS. Mr Austin could not understand all the fuss about the HIV-positive internees: “They’re gonna die anyway, right?”

The Orlando Sentinel ran a story on the front page noted that “Many fear that tens of thousands of refugees could sail for Miami around Inauguration Day.” On January 28th, Clinton began backpeddling and stated he would continue his predecessor’s policies. Hearing this, a number of refugees detained on Guantanamo began a hunger strike. Yolande Jean was widely recognized as the leader of this movement:

Before the strike, I’d been in prison, a tiny cell, but crammed in with many others, men, women, and children. There was no privacy. Snakes would come in; we were lying on the ground, and lizards were climbing over us. One of us was bitten by a scorpion…there were spiders. Bees were stinging the children, and there were flies everywhere: whenever you tried to eat something, flies would fly into your mouth. Because of all this, I just got to the point, sometime in January, I said to myself, come what may, I might well die, but we can’t continue in this fashion.

We called together the committee and decided to have a hunger strike. Children, pregnant women, everyone was lying outside, rain or shine, day and night. After fifteen days without food, people began to faint. The colonel called us together and warned us and me particularly, to call off the strike. We said no.

At four in the morning, as we were lying on the ground, the colonel came with many soldiers. They began to beat us–I still bear a scar from this–and to strike us with nightsticks….True, we threw rocks back at them, but they outnumbered us and they were armed. They then used big tractors to back us against the shelter, and they barred our escape with barbed wire. -p65

Haitian advocates stepped up their pressure and on March 26th, 1993 Judge Johnson of New York ruled against the administration and ordered all detainees with fewer than 200 total T-lymphocytes be transferred to the US. The Haitians finally arrived in the US on April 8, 1993. Judge Johnson called the camp “the only known refugee camp in the world composed entirely of HIV positive refugees.”

Haitians and HIV: Biased Press, Public Myths

The detention of HIV-positive Haitian refugees raises a host of questions regarding a complex symbolic web linking xenophobia, racism, and a surprisingly coherent “folk model” of Haitians to which many North Americans subscribe. The persistent notion of Haitians as infected and more important, as infecting, clearly underpinned much of the American response. One legal scholar acutely observed, “The exclusion of HIV-infected Haitian refugees flows from the once firmly held perceptions that Haiti is the birthplace and primary source of the HIV virus and that most Haitian refugees are fleeing economic hardship rather than political persecution.” -p66

US People AS Responsible as Government in Regards to Haiti:

The trickle of public outrage against the US-sponsored violation of Haitian detainees’ rights paled in comparison to the 40,000 postage stamps’ worth of outrage against liberal lawmakers who wished to allow HIV-positive refugees into the country. -p68

In light of the strong forces constraining candid discussion of Guantanamo, the conclusion of one of the lawyers of the Haitians is less surprising: “We need to convince the Clinton people that what we want is reasonable and cost-effective.” No need, apparently, to convince the Clinton people that the events on Guantanamo were an abomination and a crime: “cost-effectiveness” is what matters. Journalists know this; lawyers know this.

In their earnest efforts to convince the empowered that their solution was “reasonable and cost-effective,” the Haitians’ advocates misrepresented Guantanamo. They made the naval base resemble a sanatorium–a misguided health intervention–when in fact it resembled a dungeon, a malignant expression of longstanding US policies toward Haitians. -p69